Issue 0x06 - exit %x34b4

💾 A monthly digest of text-based game development successes, failures, inspiration, and anecdotes from the members of The MUD Coders Guild.

Greetings, adventurers!

Okay, first things first: For those of you who haven’t been paying attention to r/MUD or the official Slack channel, the first-ever MUD Coders Guild Game Jam has been announced! Enter the (Multi-User) Dungeon will be a month-long game jam where competitors will be challenged to create a MUD that utilizes procedural generation in some way, shape, or form.

Enter the (Multi-User) Dungeon starts on April 15th, and will run until May 15th, with the winners being announced in the June 1st newsletter—and yes, there will be prizes! For more information, head on over to our official announcement, and may the odds be ever in your favor… or something.

RMUD is an open-source, community project initially conceptualized on the MUD subreddit in 2014. Garnering enough interest, several now core members came together and work began on creating a game that was something different from all the high-fantasy in the genre, opting for the less popularized Fantastique genre.

The goal of the Node Mud Server project is to establish a barebones mud server that supports common mud protocols and takes care of the fundamentals of network programming within the Node.js environment. This isn’t meant to be a fully playable game but instead offer a starting point for developers to design and implement their own game mechanics.

This pages takes an image and creates an ASCII-art derivative of it using an edge-detection algorithm. While image-to-ASCII conversion isn’t usually very impressive, this method is unique in that it outputs ASCII-art in every sense of the word.

Agones is a new open-source project that uses Kubernetes to host and scale dedicated game servers. While modern MUDs are hardly expected to reach the scale necessary to justify something like Agones, it is still an impressive learning opportunity.

The visible open source work left by this programmer is easily and briefly enumerated. It’s sad, therefore, to see all the criticism he’s posthumously receiving for the repositories he left unmaintained. The lovers of free work are never satisfied.

Unsure of how pg2 actually performs during node unavailability and cluster topology changes, as well as reports of problems due to race conditions and partitions, Christopher Meiklejohn set out to figure out exactly what the failure semantics of pg2 actually are.

Elixir/Erlang OTP abstractions enforce developers to split programs into independent parts. While “gen_servers” encapsulate parts of business logic on micro-level, “applications” present a more general (“service”) part of the system. Complex programs written in Elixir are always a collection of communicating OTP applications.

The Elixir Language Server provides a server that runs in the background, providing IDEs, editors, and other tools with information about Elixir Mix projects. It adheres to the Language Server Protocol, a standard for frontend-independent IDE support. Debugger integration is accomplished through the similar VS Code Debug Protocol.

Heroku is a powerful service that abstracts away most of the typical DevOps work one must do to deploy a modern web app to the cloud. It’s therefore ideal for getting a service off the ground quickly. But is it a good fit for Elixir and Phoenix?

Hex Describe is a little web application that combines Text Mapper with a random text generator like the fantastic Abulafia. Abulafia is a collection of user-contributed random generators housed within a special kind of wiki.

Part of Rare’s decision to build anti-toxicity measures directly into Sea of Thieves’ core design can be seen almost immediately upon playing. Players have a brig aboard their pirate ship, for example. Jerome Hagen, a user researcher at Microsoft, said that feature was one of many implemented to let players deal with others griefing their game.